1 Kings 10:4-9

And when the Queen of Sheba had seen all Solomon’s wisdom.

The Queen of the South versus the men of this generation

1. When the Queen of Sheba came to Jerusalem she did not come to find fault, she did not come to drive away whatever she might see by an envious or jealous, or petulant or unbelieving, questioning disposition. She evidently was prepared for a feast, and she got it. Come dull, come with the blinds pulled down and the shutters up, and you will go away thus. I think that element is in the gospel, and the other side of it is--come with the pure spirit, and you will get the pure blessing. Come expecting nothing, and you will get nothing. What is nothing? Nothing is what you get in church, for you came for it. Oh, come expecting! Although the preacher may be very dull and very flat, the Lord will remember you, and the Lord will remember Himself, and before you or I are aware, through His grace, our hearts may be made like the chariots of Amminadab! Sometimes the Lord comes with wonderful suddenness, just because there are people sitting here who are worth their room, and He cannot disappoint them.

2. And Solomon told her all her questions. There was not anything hid, or secret thing, which he told her not. And if this woman came from the uttermost ends of the earth, to speak of hard questions, so may we well come to the heavenly Solomon. Which of us has not his hard question--your torturing question, that tortures your own soul; your question that you can get no answer to anywhere else? Oh, what deep hard questions, I had almost said, are natural to our minds when we begin just to reflect and to think ever so little! Whom am I? Where am I going? Yes, there are hard questions. Come to Christ with them! I despise no man’s researches and no man’s science, but as the truth of the heavenly Solomon is in me, and is loved by me, I trust I have increasingly a most healthy and perfect contempt for their contempt of the Christ of God. Let us all be dowered with the hate of their hate, the scorn of their scorn. Ay, come to Him who is a greater than Solomon, and He will answer the hard questions.

3. Further, “And when the Queen of Sheba had seen of Solomon’s wisdom,” etc. “When she had seen,”--what? “When she had seen all Solomon’s wisdom, and the house that he had built.” Have you seen the heavenly Solomon’s house? That is to say, have you seen His person? He is fairer than the sons of men. You never saw His like. Think of His Godhead, and think of His manhood, and think of the perfect way in which these two are joined together. There He is walking by the Lake of Galilee, a man among men; and yet the eternal glory of the Godhead is in that man from Nazareth. This is the house that the Father built for Him -this human frame, and this human flesh, and this human nature of ours; think of that! Who--what architect piled a house like the house that God’s Son dwelt in and will dwell in for ever and ever? The Eternal in the human; think of it! So like ourselves after a human plan, and after a human model, bone of our bone; else we never could understand Him. His glory would just be a blinding blur and blaze that would reveal nothing to us. But God built Christ’s person a second Adam; “bone of our bone, flesh of our flesh,” and yet so high and towering and over-topping, so broad and wide, like us, and yet so unlike us.

4. “And the sitting of his servants and the attendance of his ministers, and their apparel.” When she saw that, then as the eighth verse says, she broke out, “Happy are thy men, happy are these thy servants that stand continually before thee and hear thy wisdom.” Oh, believer, I want to re-echo the Queen of Sheba’s word, spoken in that far-distant day! Dost thou know the Son of God? Hast thou come into the household of faith? Art thou His, and in such close relationship with Him, that thou art yielding thyself, body, soul, and spirit, a living sacrifice and help, for His service and glory? Then hear this word: Happy art thou. Rejoice, oh, man; rejoice, oh, believer; lift up the hands that hang down, and the feeble knees! Wherefore art thou moping and sighing and groaning, and for ever hanging thy head like a bulrush? What i in the presence of such a King wilt thou dare to mope and sigh? What! wilt thou sit down at such banquet as this, and begin with a soiled, tear-stained face? “Why art thou cast down, oh, my soul, and why art thou disquieted within me?” If thou art the close servant of this King of kings and Lord of lords, be more like your work; look as if a great honour and glory had suddenly and unexpectedly come to one who was a bond-slave till this Christ, by His truth and wisdom and grace, redeemed and made thee anew, and gave thee a place in His house for ever and ever. “The meat of His table.” Have you thought of that. And what a splendid table! and the dishes on the table! and the meat in the dishes! You could not have translated the menu card if you had got a king’s ransom. And you tell about it to your children, and it has filled your whole soul, and your memory, and your imagination. Well, well, if that is in the things of life, and it is genuine, and it is legitimate, there is a good thing in it--that, man, that is in religion. The meat of His table; think of it. Look at the dishes on that table! Look at the abundance provided to that people, not of the corporal and carnal kind, but the abundant feast for your reason, for your conscience, for your heart! Look at the piles that are there, the things you need, absolutely need, to fill your soul! Look at the wine and bread of heaven; look at the grace, look at the pardon! In this mountain doth the Lord make for all people a feast of fat things; of wines upon the lees! Look at the delicacies as well as the essentials! Look--look--all things in Christ that the heart can possibly conceive. “The meat of His table, and the sitting of His servants, and the attendance of His ministers, and their apparel.” The world can show great things in dress, and so can the Church; so can Christ. Oh, poor man, poor woman, poor preacher, let us only get a look at ourselves as we are reflected in some of those flashing mirrors in the banqueting-hall of Christ’s love and grace, and we will see something in the way of magnificent apparel! Clothed upon with what? With Christ Himself. With wonderful grace and power He that comes puts Himself, as a flowing garment, right over every soul into allegiance with Him.

5. There is one thing more to notice that took the heart out of the Queen of Sheba. “The ascent by which Solomon went up into the house of the Lord.” She was almost overcome; heart and flesh began just a little to reel and stagger at the sight of this material splendour. What is the ascent to the house of the Lord? When I think of the ascent by which He has gone up to the temple of the Lord; that is to say, when I think of Christ’s resurrection, the splendid staircase by which, O Lord, Thou hast ascended on high; when I see Christ’s resurrection; when I gaze up that shining stairway, then glories upon glories burst in upon mind and heart and imagination. “Thou hast ascended up on high, Thou hast led captivity captive!” Surely, when that magnificent stairway was open, when Christ ascended to the highest glory, then the angels and archangels burst forth, “Lift up your heads, oh ye gates, and be ye lifted up, ye everlasting doors, and let the King of Glory come in.” Again I charge you, again I charge myself, look--Behold the glories of the Lamb! Look at your ascended Lord, see His resurrection glory; see His resurrection magnificence, and never let your eyes shut to it again, never. Now, what are we going to say of all this? Oh, it is a pity to criticise, but when one thinks of how people creep and crawl into God’s house and sit with their hands in their pockets, and then creep and crawl out again, and begin to grumble; and instead of saying, “Blessed, blessed! Happy, happy! Oh, my Saviour! Oh, His wisdom! Oh, the depths of the riches of the wisdom and knowledge of God, how unsearchable are His judgments and His ways past finding out; may His name endure for ever, and last as long as the sun”--no, instead of that, you drag yourself out, and what can you grumble at, and what can you find fault with, and how dark and dreary can you look! May it not be so! (J. M’Neill.)

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The wisdom of Solomon

Good was the quest of the earnest queen, and great was Solomon, whose wisdom she sought to hear; but far better the yearning for the “wisdom from above,” as the Son of God is “greater” than the earthly son of David.

I. Wisdom is worthy of diligent pursuit.

1. Wisdom does not come unsought. The Balearic mothers hang their children’s food on the limbs of trees, and they must go hungry until they can bring them down with the bow. So God lets the vein of gold look through but not lie open upon the rock. He puts the star-depths within reach of the telescope, but not of the naked eye. The secrets of Nature are given up to the wit and not to the listlessness of men. “The clouds may drop down titles and estates,” but “wisdom must be bought.” In vain, however, is “the price of wisdom in the hand of a fool,” if he have “no heart to it.”

2. Wisdom is the principal thing. All else is appendage. Dean Stanley says, “our success in life depends not only on a right perspective--that is seeing great things as great--but on a right order--that is, seeking first things first. In vain does the rich man” lay up much goods for many years for his soul, if he has not first made certain that he will have a “soul” beyond to-night. Wisdom “held (even) in her left hand riches and honour” for Solomon. She, and not they, made him known in “the uttermost parts of the earth.”

3. Wisdom is akin to piety. It is the righteousness of the mind as that is the righteousness of heart and life. The wise man knows the truth, the religious man does the truth. And this is practical wisdom; for all sin is folly. The sinner breaks himself upon or grinds himself to powder under the rock which is always in the way, and on which the wise man builds. True science is no more at right angles with true religion than the multiplication table with honest dealing.

II. The truly wise are truly great.

1. He had a rare acquaintance with the facts of Nature, with “trees” and “herbs” and “fowls” and “creeping things” and “fishes.”

2. He “knew” better than most “what was in man.” His writings show ample knowledge of affairs and of the subtler agencies by which men are affected.

3. He had “largeness of heart.” His large intercourse with other peoples had brought breadth of view and deliberateness. His utterances are neither provincial nor ephemeral; they are the fruit of judgment, not of passion, and so belong to all men in all times.

4. He had an eminently quick and penetrative glance. He did not look round the circumference, but shot at once to the centre.

III. The earthly is but the shadow of the true. Commendable as was the zeal of the queen, and splendid as were the attainments of the king, there were manifest flaws in both, for--

1. Her notion of the nature and function of wisdom was low. Her supreme test was the ability to answer “hard questions,” and when her riddles were mastered she was satisfied.

2. The wisdom of Solomon could not save him from ruin. All worldly wisdom is fallible, being limited in scope to the inductions of experience, and narrow in appeal, since it points mainly to prudential motives. The “ wise are taken in their own craftiness”; wise in the abstract and for others, they are blind and weak for themselves.

3. In his old age he pronounced it “vanity” and pointed beyond. (J. B. Thomas, D. D.)

The worth of wisdom

We may regard the Queen of Sheba as a woman who paid a great price for wisdom.

I. The sense in which wisdom is open to us all.

1. The objects of nature are about us; human life is spent in our presence; we need but the open eye, the hearing ear, the understanding mind, and we shall be wise in that direction.

2. The record of revealed religion, of Divine truth, is to be had for a few pence.

3. Jesus Christ, who Himself is the wisdom of God, is offering Himself to us as our Saviour, our Friend, our Guide, if we will give Him our heart, if we will take His hand.

4. Eternal life, with all that it includes, both here and hereafter, is “the gift of God” (Romans 6:23).

II. The sense in which it is costly.

1. Much of the practical wisdom of life is only to be gained from a suffering experience. We buy them at the counter of experience.

2. The fixed persuasion of the Divine origin of the Christian faith is often only to be reached after the upbreaking of early confidence; after painful and perplexing doubt; after earnest and prolonged inquiry; after prayerful waiting. With much tribulation many spirits enter the kingdom of truth.

3. Entrance on our Christian course is often attended with inward strife or outward loss.

4. Attainment of the loftier heights of wisdom is the result of patient effort, of sacred thought, of fervent prayer, of self-sacrifice. For we can only see God with the pure heart (Matthew 5:8). Only love understands love; nothing but spiritual excellency will appreciate spiritual beauty. “Only the good discern the good.”

III. The supreme worth of wisdom. (Anon.)